by Greg Palast
And what will this cost the taxpayer? Nothing! Less than nothing, in fact, because the vouchers will cost only $3,500, while the state currently spends $7,000 per pupil in their current no-good schools. Parents, say The Wall Street Journal and voucher advocates, should have a “choice” of schools, not one chosen for their kids by bureaucrats. The proposal meant to build on the “success” of a five-year-old Arizona program that now provides $1,000 school vouchers.
OK, class: What is wrong here? Umm, well, it’s not so easy to find a good school that will teach your kid for $3,500 a year, and there are exactly none for $1,000. In other words, your school voucher doesn’t get you into school. You can give a poor kid a $3,500 voucher, but it won’t get him into Phillips Academy. Little Antonio can use his voucher for about four weeks of Phillips ($33,000 per school year), at which point he’ll have to go back to picking broccoli outside Phoenix.
In other words, the Arizona “voucher” program, like every other school voucher program proposed in the USA, is not a voucher at all. A voucher is a coupon that lets you get something for no cost. An airline screws up your ticket, you get a hotel voucher, you don’t pay for your room. However, the Arizona “voucher” is nothing but a discount coupon, the kind you get in the mail every day and toss in the recycle bin.
Vouchers vs. Coupons (Source: Cole Brothers Circus)
So who benefits from this “free” private school program? According to No Child Left expert Scott Young, 76% of the money handed out for Arizona’s voucher program has gone to children already in private schools. In other words, the $1,000 check from the state turned into a $1,000 subsidy for wealthy parents, a $1,000 discount on private schools for the privileged. How astonishing: A program touted as a benefit for working-class kids that turns into a subsidy for rich ones. You’re shocked.
What about little Antonio? He returns with his unused voucher to his wretched under-financed local school in Apache County, Arizona. Unfortunately, there are no new textbooks, because the $1,000 voucher has been pocketed by a few parents who are already sending their kids to private school. The tab for the free lunch for the privileged kids is picked up by Antonio and friends: 20% if the local school districts’ federal funds must be used to pay for the buses to transport privileged voucher students.
What I don’t understand about the Arizona legislature is why, having discovered this formula for better education for less money, they don’t apply it to other products as well. Why not car vouchers? “Everyone in Arizona should have a choice of cars! Why should the average Joe be stuck with an old beater when he can have a Mercedes?” All the state has to do is issue “Mercedes” vouchers backed by $3,500 from the state. It doesn’t matter that there’s no Mercedes dealer who will give you the car for $3,500.
I’ve never encountered a single opponent of school vouchers, of real vouchers where you choose the school and the state pays. But that ain’t going to happen. You know it. I know it. And the clowns who are selling these counterfeit “vouchers” know it too. So what’s their game?
The answers are in the test, class. The fifteen states that complain that the testing required by No Child Left exceeds the entire federal layout for the program miss the point. Testing is the heart and soul of No Child Left Behind.
The new world requires highly educated workers, but not too many. We saw how rising productivity created gargantuan wealth worldwide in the past two decades for a few. Maintaining the rise of productivity and riches through new technology requires a skilled, imaginative, highly educated, well-trained workforce. In India, very highly skilled workers account for one million jobs—about 2% of the workforce. America can afford to make it 10%. But no more. What about the other 90%? Someone’s got to unload the goods shipped in from China, stock Wal-Mart’s shelves and ask you, “Do you want fries with that?” In this flat, tilted new world, we have to adopt the methods used by emperors of Confucian China: Test for the best, cull the rest.
Of course, not everyone takes the same test. Only “Title 1” schools must test students: working class and poor schools. The wealthiest suburban districts are exempt and all schools where students wear designer blazers.
It’s true that our President took a test to get into Yale. It had one question: “Is your grandfather, Prescott Bush, a Yale Trustee?” His answer, “Yes,” gave him a perfect score.
No Child Left offers no “options” for those with the test score Mark of Cain—no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new social Darwinism, the marketplace jungle brought into the classroom. This is educational eugenics: Identify the nation’s loser class early on. Trap them, then train them cheap. Someone has to care for the privileged. No society can have winners without lots and lots of losers. And so we have No Child Left Behind—to provide the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale Alumni Club, punch the cash registers color-coded for illiterates, and pamper the winner class on the higher floors of the new economic order.
Hope I Die Before My Next Refill
How did this happen? How did Americans fall backward into the jaws meant to chew the Third World and the Old World. Who took away our New Deal?
I was in the drugstore today out here in Southold just down the road from the Terrorism Vulnerability Point. Some old guy in front of me was picking up his little paper bag of prescription medicine. The lady behind the counter handed him a credit card slip and said, “I’m sorry.”
She was sorry because the bill was over $1,200. The old man stared at the charge card receipt and stared at it some more. Hesitating, he signed, then said, “I hope I die before I have to pay for the next refill.”
He wasn’t joking. The lady behind the counter said, “Oh, don’t ever say that.” And she said it in such a way that it was clear that she’d heard the same thought before, in different words, from too many of the old folk that come by.
And I was thinking, “I wonder if he voted for Bush.”
I mean, did he vote for the man who would stop boys from kissing boys, who would allow big stone icons of the Ten Commandments in the Southold courthouse, who would get Saddam before he got us? In other words, was he a blind soldier in Karl Rove’s army of the angry who would rather vote against themselves, for deadly high drug prices dictated by Big Pharma, for no national health insurance, in return for a promise from George Bush that he will be the malicious defender of their prejudices?
The polls tell us that Americans are in an ugly mood: too many jobs leaving for China, too many body bags returning from Iraq, and a bad feeling about a president grabbing for Grandma’s Social Security check.
America is hurting, but what really hurts is that the wounds are self-inflicted.
1927. Again.
The National Public Radio news anchor was so excited I thought she’d pee herself: The President of the United States had flown his plane down to 1,700 feet to get a better look at the flood damage! Later, I saw the photo of him looking out of the window of Air Force One. The President looked very serious and concerned.
That was on Wednesday, August 31, 2005, two days after the levees broke and Lake Ponchartrain swallowed New Orleans. The President had waited the extra days to stop first at the Pueblo El Mirage Golf Course in Arizona.
I’m sure the people of New Orleans would have liked to show their appreciation for the official Presidential photo-strafing, but their surface-to-air missiles were wet.
I don’t want to give the impression the President did nothing. He swiftly ordered the federal government to dispatch to New Orleans 18 water purification units, 50 tons of food, two mobile hospitals, expert search teams, and 20 lighting units with generators. However, that was President Chávez, whose equipment was refused entry to the disaster zone by the U.S. State Department. President Bush also flew in generators and lights. They were used for a photo op in the French Quarter, then removed when the President concluded his television pitch.
The corpses floating through the Ninth Ward attracted vultures. There was
ChoicePoint, our friends from Chapter 1: The Fear. They picked up a contract to identify the bodies using their War on Terror DNA database. In the face of tragedy, America’s business community pulled together, lobbying hard to remove the “Davis-Bacon” regulation that guarantees emergency workers receive a minimum prevailing wage. The Rev. Pat Robertson got a piece of the action. The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Web site encouraged those wanting to help victims to donate to the charities he controls. Within the week, the Navy penned a half-billion-dollar contract for reconstruction work with Halliburton. More would come.
Our President, as he does in any emergency situation, announced additional tax cuts. He ordered immediate write-offs for new equipment used in rebuilding. That will likely provide a relief for Halliburton, but the deductions were useless to small New Orleans businesses which had no income to write off. The oil majors, the trillion-dollar babies, won a $700 million tax break.
Don’t think of hurricanes as horrors, but as opportunities. For the schoolchildren among the refugees, instead of schools, our President promised school “vouchers” on a grand scale.
And there was a bonus. Louisiana had been a “purple” state—neither a solid Republican Red nor Democratic Blue. It was up for grabs politically. With a Democratic Senator and a new Democratic Governor, Louisiana was ready to lead the South out of the GOP. Louisiana’s big blue Democratic splotch was enclosed within the city below sea level. On August 29, this major electoral problem for the Republican party was solved. I’m not saying our rulers deliberately let New Orleans drown. But before they would save it, the lifeguards boarding Air Force One had to play a few more holes.
In 1986, I was hired by the City of New Orleans to check out suspicious doings by a corporation called “Entergy.” I flew in to meet City Councilman Brod Bagert, who is also New Orleans’s top trial lawyer and its most accomplished poet. Over beignets and chicory coffee at the river, he said, “You want to know what this city’s about, Mr. Palast? I’ll show you.” He drove me to a concrete bunker, banged on the metal door, and greeted a guy named Fishhead, who brought me into the belly of a horrendously loud, gargantuan and astonishing apparatus. “This here, Mr. Palast, is a pump. Forget Bourbon Street. This is all you have to know about New Orleans: We are under water. Below sea level, sir, and the only thing that keeps the river from pouring in over our heads are these pumps. You got that, son?”
Outside flowed the Mississippi. America’s toilet. The poisoned expectorations of a hundred cities dumped into it or leached from suburban lawns and from factories when no one is looking, come out here in the tap water. A couple years ago, we buried our friend Gary Groesch, aged 50, of some mystery disease. “The City That Care Forgot” is their motto. The City That Everyone Forgot, a Bantustan where the forgotten can be ignored except for the jazzy minstrel shows for tourists.
I called Bagert four months after the flood. Nearly half the city is still in the dark.
The electric company, New Orleans Public Service, “NOPSI,” is owned by a holding company, Entergy, the company Bagert, Groesch and I investigated in 1986. Here’s what we found. In 1986, the New Orleans company was going broke because of the eye-popping cost of buying wholesale power—four times normal—from a company called Middle South Energy, charges they were passing right on to their captive customers in the city. Middle South is 100% owned and controlled by, you’ve guessed it, Entergy. But these were the days of government regulation, and government ordered an end to the shell game.
Then came deregulation and the siphoning restarted with a vengeance. Busy shuffling loot from pocket to pocket, Entergy had neither the concern nor funds to harden their system against a hurricane.
But from the looks of it, and my own review of their accounts, their plan in case of the long-expected flood came down to “turn off the lights and declare their subsidiary bankrupt,” which they did three weeks after the hurricane. Negligent damage liabilities and rebuilding obligations were thrown into the Dumpster of the bankruptcy courts, and the holding company walked away. But don’t worry, Entergy the holding company is doing quite well, posting a big 24% leap in earnings for the third quarter, a profit it attributes to “weather.” J
So who’s to blame for losing New Orleans? That’s easy. It was Franklin Roosevelt. New Orleans was the victim of the New Deal, according to New York Times columnist John Tierney, in “Losing that New Deal Religion.” The free market flat-worlder’s argument goes like this: The idea that government’s job is to protect you is gone with the wind, drowned in the Mississippi. Government’s the problem, and the solution is… Wal-Mart. Turn FEMA into WEMA, the “Wal-Mart Emergency Management Agency.” That’s a quote. Let the market do it, let the market save us. Louisiana’s Republican Senator David Vitter was so excited by the idea of selling off the government, “privatizing,” that he introduced a bill at high tide to do just that, “privatize” emergency planning.
But Senator Vitter, didn’t Joe Allbaugh tell you? New Orleans hurricane planning was privatized.
You should remember Allbaugh from Chapter 4: The Con. It was Allbaugh, as Governor George Bush’s Chief of Staff who, in 1997, handled the Governor’s personal emergency: His office allegedly called the Texas Air Guard to let them know that Karen Hughes would be dropping by to “make sure there’s nothing in there [Bush’s war file] that’ll embarrass the Governor.”
Under Bill Clinton, the Emergency Management Agency was run by emergency managers. That was the dull way to do it. In 2001, Bush made Joe Allbaugh FEMA’s chief and the two of them converted the agency into something more exciting, a front-line command center in the War on Terror, dissolving the agency into the Department of Homeland Security. And that’s when the unexciting emergency planning work was put up for sale. (Allbaugh quit in 2003 and turned the Wal-Marted FEMA over to his old college roommate, Michael Brown, an executive with the Arabian Horse Association.)
It wasn’t in the Times, but a year before the hurricane, the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA signed a half-million-dollar contract with a private operator to write up “a catastrophic hurricane disaster plan for the City of New Orleans,” says the press release. Their plan was innovative. We know it was innovative because the work was handed to a company called “Innovative Emergency Management.”
Innovative Emergency Management, said a company release, had “teamed” with expert James Lee Witt, the renowned Clinton FEMA chief, which was good news for New Orleans. The bad news was, it wasn’t true. Witt, despite IEM’s press release, said he was not part of the Innovative “team.”
No matter. Innovative Emergency Management’s founder, president and CEO, Madhu Beriwal, I believe, owns an umbrella and she’s an exceptionally experienced donor to the Republican party. She has more campaign committee citations, including donations to Senator Vitter, than evacuation plans to her name. Maybe she has extraordinary credentials for saving a city from flood, but when we called seeking her experience and credentials, we got nothing.
IEM’s press release, besides the fib about Witt, made this utterly truthful point:
Given this area’s vulnerability and elevation…a plan that facilitates a rapid and effective hurricane response is critical.
Amen to that. So I called IEM in Baton Rouge to see their critical and innovative plan that was supposed to be complete well before Katrina’s landfall. The Wal-Mart of disaster prep couldn’t get me a copy. In fact, they couldn’t say if they had it. Nor if the City of New Orleans had it. Or if Senator Vitter or anyone had it or if it existed. Could they tell me the name of someone at FEMA who had the evacuation plan? They hesitated, so I prompted, “Well, who do you call if there’s an emergency?” The question stumped them. And it stumped FEMA, which wouldn’t provide me a copy. The problem, I was informed, was that they couldn’t confirm it existed.
There is nothing new under the sun. A Republican president going for the photo op as the Mississippi rolls over New Orleans. It was 1927, and President Calvin Coolidge sent
Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, “a little fat man with a notebook in his hand,” who mugged for the cameras and promised to build the city a wall of protection. They had their photos taken. Then they left to play golf with Ken Lay or, rather, the Ken Lay railroad baron equivalent of his day.